


mourning is a process

by Lutelyre



Category: Naruto
Genre: ANBU - Freeform, Angst, Character Death, Chronic illnesss, Death, Genma has really had enough of this shit, M/M, Sex, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, Threesome, kind of threesome, lots of swearing, my kakashi muse always butts in, poor genma, poor hayate, poor kakashi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-11
Updated: 2014-07-11
Packaged: 2018-02-08 08:39:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1934211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lutelyre/pseuds/Lutelyre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Laugh like you really mean it, my lover. Laugh the world away, so it won't come knocking at the door.</p>
            </blockquote>





	mourning is a process

**Author's Note:**

> Genma and Kakashi are some of my favorite characters, and I like the idea of Hayate being portrayed this way. It seems more realistic for a ninja. 
> 
> I do not own Naruto. Mirror posted on ffnet.

Mourning is a Process

X

Laugh like you really mean it

My lover-

X

When he was 19, ANBU tattoo stinging-new, bright with life and sick with glory, they told Hayate he really was sick. They told him he was going to die. Told him he was going to be dead in a grave sooner than six months of sunsets, and he should stop now at the bloody dance and steel chase and see a year of sunsets instead.

Hayate listened quietly, declined resignation, then shrugged them off and shrugged it off. He could die in six months and he could die tomorrow, so what does it matter? Hayate doesn't think about it. Hayate doesn't like to think about things that don't matter.

Doesn't like to think at all really, when he can help it.

He goes down to the swimming spot in the shallows of the river instead, because May is practically summer after all. He slips into the cool water, floats like an ice cube, and laughs like a daisy.

Genma comes by of course, because he is worried and he knows, like always. Genma's senbon is clenched tight and worried in his teeth, flicking back and forth, and he stands with his arms crossed over his chest and his eyes glaring dagger-bright, amber-stoked and luscious as always.. Hayate laughs some more and looks up, tells him he looks like a dumbass upside-down.

Hayate likes to laugh. It burns and tickles through his throat at the same time, and even though it usually brought on the cough, he liked the feeling. Hayate always loved to tempt the fates.

Genma stares at him incredulously for a second. Then he wades in, ANBU armor or no, and punches Hayate whip-smart hard in the jawbone. Hayate has to stop chuckling or choke as he splashes in the water, but when he resurfaces he laughs harder. Perhaps to piss Gen-kun off, perhaps not.

"You're the dumbass, you fucking, you shit-headed..." Genma's mutter trails off, his voice thick and low, talking like he'd pricked his tongue on his senbon and had a mouthful of blood again. Only, there was no red on his lips.

Hayate struggles a bit for breath, and keeps giggling to himself.

After a minute Genma sighs and lets his body sink down into water, sink up to the surface, and float like a heavy drift-wood log in the water. It's a good thing ANBU vests are so versatile. His senbon sticks straight up in the air, his fingers spread and Hayate knows that he's thinking of everything, all the little bits and pieces and stringy-strings that make things so damn complicated all the time, all the things Hayate likes to forget.

Hayate bobs next to Genma, floating like an ice cube and thinking of nothing—nothing that matters—and laughing until his voice turns from laughing to wheezing and from wheezing to coughing, and then the coughing turns to hacking. Then it evens out and he starts all over again.

The sun sends bleeding rays shattering into the sky as it sets above their heads.

X

It's June, and Genma is all sharp angles. One too many missions gone totally fucked, one too many necks gone merrily slit, and one too many times he's taken home an extra set of dog-tags that don't fucking belong to anybody anymore. Not a soul. Without warm skin beneath them, dog-tags feel like miniature headstones, dangling clinking twinkling from his fingers.

Hayate wanders up to the other ANBU, lazy dark eyes and lazy dark smile, and tosses him a cigarette.

His dog-tags are on his chest though, resting in the perfect concave shallows of a stark collarbone.

Genma catches it in his teeth, because his hands are shaking, but they might stop if he gets some nicotine, and then he could stop thinking about the latest set of graves that he'd carried home, the latest field of blood-red poppies that had bloomed as he walked by, sprinkling the seeds on kunai blades. Hayate has a cig in his mouth too, and that is bad, all kinds of bad, sitting there on his lazy lips, white on white. Genma tries to level a glare, but he's washing splattered organ from his hands and so he can't pluck it from Hayate's chapped pale mouth.

Hayate smirks, a shiny little something that he knows and you don't. He drags on the smoke and says around it, "Think I like these."

And Genma knows it won't do any good to tell him that the cancer stick will rot his already dying lungs, because this was Hayate and Hayate didn't listen and wasn't sick. Hayate was probably already addicted.

Hayate got addicted to things quick. Things like Kenjutsu and fighting muck-dirty, underhanded blows as his eyes smirk, things like painkillers and adrenaline sliding through the ribs like fire, things like life. He was stupid like that.

So Genma just dries his hands and lights his own cigarette. He throws a glance at the other ANBU under his eyes anyway—cut and rip and make you feel guilty, honey seared so hot you burn—but Hayate just chuckles a grating laugh and looks at him with his eyes over bright and his mouth very loose, split along the sides.

"No ones going to wanna kiss you."

Genma knows he sounds childish, but who really cares a single fuck about childhood anymore? Nobody he knows ever had one.

Hayate pauses, like he holds a secret on his tongue, and then he leans over quick as a flash and his black hair smells like soap and his dry mouth tastes like sickness when he presses it to Genma's abruptly, the secrets inside unraveling out, glorious and filthy.

Then Hayate turns with a ragged laugh and walks away.

"I don't care."

Genma licks his lips and shakes his head after the other ninja, remembering how to breathe.

X

July is hot and bloody, missions too fast to count, and Genma's been sleeping with Hayate for a while now. Or maybe Hayate's been sleeping with him-who knew really?

Hot and bloody and sheets around his legs, mouth against his mouth, ribs against his ribs, edges so thin and angular they cut his skin wide open.

Hayate pounds on his door still in ANBU blacks, and Genma takes off his own mask, (stained as always, red poppy flowers, but he'll clean it later) spits his senbon to sink into the wall and opens it up to see Hayate grinning like a daisy chain, bright and lovely and liqueur-soaked

There is another man with him, tall and lean and ANBU marked.

Hayate coughs deep, rough, ripped and his fingers shake, but he moves in to kiss Genma hard, all teeth and tongue and dried blood from his wet lungs in the back of his mouth. Sake bottles clink in his hands.

Genma doesn't ask what the fuck Hayate is doing, getting drunk so recklessly when he'd been so sick lately, because you didn't talk about that with Hayate. Hayate wouldn't stop.

Instead he breaks the kiss and turns to raise an eyebrow at the other ANBU, a man who stands casual as a scarecrow, hands in his pockets and mismatched eyes watching close. Genma grips Hayate's bone wrists, sharp points of light against his palms. Connection craves multiples.

But Hayate laughs high and sweet, perfectly healthy, and shakes him off; snapping hands away to sling a rakish arm around the masked mans shoulders, possessive. He drinks from a bottle and smiles lazy-bright again, beckoning, beautiful, and careless.

"We're going out dancing," He smiles, "You're coming."

That night Genma went dancing with Hayate and Hatake Kakashi. Hayate got drunk and Genma watched. Hayate kissed Hatake Kakashi and Genma watched. Hayate threw up and collapsed, shuddering, eyes huge and dark as a vacuum, snatches of time stolen away through those blown pupils, and Genma took him home.

The next day Hayate is fuzzy, and far too sick to move anything except his chest as he pants great heaving breaths. Genma doesn't say anything, because Hayate wouldn't be able to hear it over the sound of his violent coughs anyway.

X

August is hotter, with sunsets that spangle purple instead of red, and Genma is swimming in the river again, letting the water make him skim surfaces.

Hayate and Hatake Kakashi are there too, slipping in and out of the water like eels, tied together with ribbon and letting lips travel over from skin to skin to skin. Hayate kisses them both, and skin slides, and Genma wonders he's supposed to feel.

When Kakashi brushes close, too close sometimes, he moves away, flinches against the sinfully hot mouth that pulses over his spine. He moves nearer to Hayate and pulls his arms around the muscle-sinew and sharp edges that Hayate lives in now. He lets razor-thin hands shove him down for a blood-backed kiss, and closes his eyes.

Kakashi watches Genma and Genma watches Hayate. His eyes are ever following, counting the dog-tags that chime off every day that ends with everyone alive.

But Hayate doesn't watch anyone, doesn't pay attention at all, because he's too busy living and breathing as much as he can. Because there are only so many sunsets and so much time and Hayate doesn't care, doesn't ever care.

Doesn't think.

Hayate trains until he drops, gasping and twitching on the ground as Genma pins him down, holds him still, and just wishes to fucking God that Hayate would please, please stop. He whispers the plea into Hayate's neck when the tendons go tight and Hayate laughs through the foam in his mouth. Hayate goes on the solo assassinations when they let him, mouth a black dagger smile and hair spilling like spider silk over his eyes. Hayate smokes a pack a day and Genma does too because he can't fucking stand having his hands shake this much, so much Hayate notices and shackles them to the headboard between his own wrists. Genma groans under Hayate's rolling hips, but he can still feel the tremors, and they don't come from his own fingers at all.

Hayate laughs, Hayate turns his back on the horizon, Hayate coughs and kisses and kills and lives.

Genma watches. He keeps his eyes trained on Hayate's flitting eyes and dancing smile, and tries not to spit in Kakashi's face, tries not to flinch when Hayate's fingers start trembling against his skin.

Hayate stumbles out of the bedroom and pours his coffee. It's black and filled with a shit-ton of caffeine and Genma knows it's not good for him.

The needle in his mouth is singing sharp, metallic and cloying and angry on the back of his teeth.

The senbon-chewer spits his needle at Hayate's cup, watches as it is knocked away easily before it skewers the ceramic. Hayate's red-rimmed eyes cut to Genma's and he smiles that careless smirk; quirked, broken, boiling over with sickness. The smile that hates the sunset, that lives because it's got nothing else to do, that burns and smelts irreversible things together and then flickers out.

Genma slouches over to the table. He smiles back, maybe poppyflower-red, maybe cracked, and picks up Hayate's coffee cup. He takes a gulp, just to dare, just to push, just to walk the line of the cliff and feel the wind on his face for once, for fucking once.

Hayate throws his neck back to laugh, all gasping breath, with the lines of his collarbone and throat standing out stark and white because he's gotten so fucking thin again.

Genma gulps more bitter coffee and watches like he always does, remembering last night when he dragged his coffee-bitter tongue up Hayate's jutting collarbones all the way up his Adams apple.

When Hayate finishes the coughing fit that came after his laughing one, he wipes his mouth, eyes simmering gray, pupils already blown out with pot or cocaine or whatever else bit of fucking drug he takes now all the time because he can. His eyes are shadows and light playing together underneath the heaviness of dark lids.

Hayate never stops, Genma knows. He keeps going until it's over and gone and you're deader than dead. He doesn't care. Genma knows this. Like the connection points of circuit that line his wrists, only Genma can see that perfect ebb and flow of reason in Hayate's brilliant, illogical head, and he only sees it because it is not there.

Kakashi walks casually into the room, sheet wrapped, face peeking behind a curl of his mask. He leans against the doorway, eyes flicking to Genma to Hayate and then over again. His chest is silvery-gold in the morning sun, intoxicating and luminous, absorbing as much as possible because that is the only thing he knows how to do. Genma's jaw tightens, doesn't turn. His eyes stay on the sword-nin who stands in front of him thin and trembling and grinning with white teeth.

Hayate's mouth holds laughter like a heady plum-rich liquor as he leans in and presses his lips against Genma's throat, right beneath the ear and over the pulse. Genma shivers at the play of breath as Hayate's giggles vibrate through his lips.

The shinobi chuckles dry and rasping and whispers, too low for Hatake to hear, or just uncaring if he did,

"Hate him?"

Genma shivers again and wishes they were in the cold water of the river turning blue; wrapped and pruned into each others skin so it wouldn't stand out how cold Hayate's lips were.

"Yes."

And when Hayate laughs again at that and his fingers grasp the coffee cup around Genma's hand to pull him forward and pry the handle from his fingers as he meets his mouth because he wants his hit, wants it now, Genma tastes the sick on Hayate's tongue, tastes the death that comes in orange and red and sunset colors, and wonders if he really does.

X

Early September, and it's a night where stars hang lethargic and dimmed in the sky and the moon shines like a ten watt bulb.

Genma and Hayate have just gotten back from the hospital after a mission where Hayate almost died, the stupid fucker, and Genma had felt the bite of terror curdling his blood. Genma thinks of the moment where Hayate's sword had spun from his control, where the ninja's chest had convulsed and his eyes had gone glazed for a split second, and the stupid target had stupidly noticed.

(His dog-tags flying up from his caved chest, catching moonlight as bursts of vermillion poisonous poppy flower bloomed across the sky, and Hayate's eyes so big, so fucking wide, as though they needed to catch the very last moment they'd get to see, slam it into frozen time, a block of ice unable to be chipped, an ensnared fly in a web that turns to viscous glue when you touch.)

He shuts his eyes from the images and grits his teeth a little tighter, groans as Hayate's fingers grip the base of his cock and drag, an electric, mind-numbing sort of ache spreading up his back as Hayate thrusts his hips, breath ragged and touches rough. His hips roll as they push into Genma, dirty and stained red, filthy with lust and smoke and sickness as he laps at Genma's skin. There is catch and pull of skin as Genma pistons back against him, angry and helpless and choking on the vile bitterness that rests in his throat like a sponge. He digs his knees farther apart into the sheets where he kneels with Hayate's bone chest on his back, drags his toes around Hayate's lean calves, tears a gasp from Hayate's rotten lungs. Shoves back, rocks his hips hard, groans like there are nails in his throat because Hayate's mouth is wet and his fingers are even more so, spit-slick, heavy, with an unsteady, jagged, perfect rhythm. Hayate's breathing catches and gasps but doesn't let up, and the sick ANBU keeps fucking Genma steadily, bringing lights up behind Genma's eyes and coiling in Genma's abdomen.

Genma snarls into the bed, angry and about to burst in more ways than one; ache in his body and ecstasy in his nerves and ripping in his chest.

Hayate can fuck him now and Kakashi later to prove to Genma he's fine can't he? Hayate can fuck him now and Kakashi later to prove to himself he's fine. Hells, Hayate can fuck them both, together, so he can feel it, live in the slide of skin and the constricting pressure, live the pounding ache and the curl of tongues.

But Genma remembers vomit that is filled with more red than bile, remembers the beeping hospital monitors and the sad, quiet looks on nurses' faces as they scurried like fucking idiotic mice around a ghost-white bed. He remembers the sunset count, and remembers that this stupid shitty world really is going to die.

It's a fucking tragedy, it is, and all he can do is tear it out, rip it away, and then try to sew it together again.

But now Hayate's breath coats Genma's neck, hot and humid and fucking perfect, and his tongue cuts a path across Genma's shoulder blade before teeth bite a ring of imprints into the back of his neck as Hayate pushes harder and Genma lets his eyes roll and his mouth fall open at the feeling.

Because Hayate was alive, so alive, and he was far too busy being alive, being with Genma, to bother thinking about silly things. Far too busy to die.

Hayate hits somewhere within Genma that is deep and sweetly aching, a million brilliant connective points of pressure, and Genma's toes curl as he shoves back.

Hayate's breath blurs as he murmurs against the back of Genma's neck, but he doesn't stop moving.

"Love me?"

Genma feels the aching-sweet place stab again. Points on a wrist, dog-tags on a chain, a laugh that rumbles through his skin like kunai through his gut.

"Yes."

But when Genma comes shocky-hot and dizzying, he can still hear the sudden violent cough-retch that jerks Hayate's movements and makes the shinobi's fingers tremble and clench spastic on Genma's hips. Genma can feel tiny drops of blood landing on the heated skin of his back from Hayate's gasping mouth, wet and slick. And Genma wonders through the blind-white of orgasm if he really does.

X

He is a day away from October and a month from twenty, bright with fury and sick with death, when Hayate really does die. He falls to the ground and bleeds out and shuts off, taken by sand. Hayate doesn't think about it, because he can't, but if he could then he'd have laughed himself sick at the irony.

A life cut to six months of sunsets and then cut to nearly five. It just got better and better. But Hayate's not going to be laughing at all anymore. He's not going to be breathing and coughing and fighting—because he's dead.

Dead and deader than dead.

Things are strange like that.

They bury him under dirt and give his dog-tags to his mother and carve his name into a cold marble memorial that stands under four faces.

Genma thinks that's funny, because one thing Hayate never expected was to die in combat and get his name on the Hero's Stone. He doesn't laugh about it, even though Hayate would've.

Genma tries to get his dog-tags, carry them in his hand and run his fingers over that kanji a hundred times, carry them here and there and everywhere, carry them home. Tried to let them twinkle jingle in his palm, twirl them on the chain and then wear them around his own neck just to warm them up again because they were so, so, cold.

But they gave them to his mother and Genma only held them for a second, a measly fucking second that barely let him read the kanji once, let alone thaw them from ice with fogged breath and a clutched hand.

Genma tries to stop them from putting him under soil and bugs because Hayate wouldn't have liked that, but he can't find the words really, there are all these things Hayate forgot to tell him to say because he didn't quite care enough too. Instead he spits his sharpest senbon into the dead ground over a dead Hayate and walks away.

He pointedly doesn't think about teeth bared in shit-eating grins, about the sound wet lungs make as they breathe, about the taste of blood in the back of a mouth.

He doesn't cry either, because Hayate would've called him a dumbass.

He just goes on.

It would have all ended in about a month anyway.

But a months worth of sunsets was a lot, as he was beginning to realize. Genma tells Hayate this, working it around his mouth as he lies in bed and talking to his ceiling as though his tongue was coated with blood again. Only, there was still no red on his lips.

But Hayate didn't listen.

Hayate never listened. Hayate broke the rules and leapt forward, then kept on leaping, always doing everything first, as hard as he could, and never looking back.

If there was an afterlife he was probably there doing the exact same thing, leaping and laughing and not looking back. Not looking back to nights stuck between two bodies and sweat-soaked sheets, to balls of fire sinking above a river, to a senbon sticking out of grave-ground and a quietly masked face.

Genma tries not to feel cheated when he sees sunsets now.

X

Almost November, and he is in the river again, even though it's freezing and everyone thinks he's mad. It's always where things float back to and it's where he should be, obviously.

Things like poppies can't float very well in the river, but Genma makes an effort.

He supposes he might be sort-of mad, a little broken-off, a bit fucked up beyond repair. It's really not that big a deal.

ANBU are allowed to be anyway, so who gives a fuck?

He is swimming face down near the river bed, with handfuls of cold mud between his fingers.

Kakashi walks up, silent until Genma knows he's suddenly there in the water. Genma would've translocated away immediately, as he'd been doing for the past month, because he didn't want to see him, didn't want to look at the copy-nin and have to deal with Kakashi being alive and here while Hayate was…not.

But there is too much mud in his hands and water in his nose and so when he breaks the surface with a scrunched nose and a flip of wild water droplets it is to late.

Kakashi is in the water, black and white splash on canvas. His hands are bird-thin, body a rail-waif in the swirling water of the river, backdrop bleached behind his wild hair. There was a milky mournfulness in his frame, an unexplained beauty to his movement; the soft rise and fall of his chest, the limpness of his gracefully deadly hands, the way his steel-storm eyelashes matted when he blinked.

Genma turns away, angry. He doesn't need the reminder of Hatake Kakashi's complete almost-perfection, the slight broken-lost quality that mars him into something singular, special, breath-taking.

Kakashi watches him with his silly red eye and his not-so-silly grey one, and then abruptly moves forward, little eddies of water spacing around his waist. He leans in, practically a smoky mirage. His breath touches Genma's lips. Sugar-sweet.

Genma's eyes widen-flash of struck-match fire-bright gold-he jerks his head back and his fists up.

"Fuck you!"

That was wrong. Fucked up. So fucking fucked up. His body sings like it is waiting for the derisive blood-choked laugh of a shinobi behind them who used to find hilarity here. Here where they used to swim in hot July like eels.

But of course, there is no mocking giggle, no amused chuckle.

Kakashi leans back, then flops down to float on the water and sets his blood and black eye spinning hopelessly in his skull up at the sky that is full of pink and yellow and red.

Genma remembers drops of blood on his back and tries to breathe, hands clenching. It wasn't fucking fair. Kakashi just floats there, like he hadn't just tried to kiss Genma, like he was fine, like it was nothing.

The senbon-suckers fists flash through the air as a blur and he punches Kakashi's jaw with a stinging blow that propels the other ANBU down into the water, limbs flailing up like a little girl's play ragdoll.

Genma looks away. His heart is twisting funnily in his chest, because he'd done that to Hayate, right here in this same spot and Hayate had laughed at him until he couldn't breathe. Genma waits for Kakashi to surface, trying to hold the stinging from his throat, trying to hold the world together.

But when the Copy-ninja comes back to air he doesn't cough or smile or laugh up at the Gods. He punches Genma back.

Genma reels back because shit, that hurt like hell, and claps a hand to his jaw, rubbing it as a bruise blooms under his fingers. He feels a sudden snapping urge to laugh. To clutch his sides and let sick giggles spill out of his mouth until he runs on empty. He never laughed before.

He hated Kakashi. He wasn't a liar.

If he does lose his breath in the tide of mirth that threatens to crash over the dam, soak the foundations to rot, wash the sky away, he's not going to stop. He will fly all to pieces that scatter like sunset splashed glass, go all-the-way-broken and completely-fucked-up and a nice lady with white clothes and white hands will come and stick him with a needle;

Make him go bye-bye and lullaby and sweet dreams, like they did for Hatake sometimes, when he started speaking to the air about gifts that had to be repaid, about trash and teammates, like they did—had done—for Hayate when his body had shook and twitched without stopping, foam and blood at his mouth and crazy-laughter in his eyes and Genma had stabbed himself with his senbon and watched without moving.

Genma fights down the laughter that swells in his chest along with a thousand clinging thoughts and leans back toward the copy-ninja who'd watched, as he always did, while Genma jumped back and then stepped forward again. His eye rotates slowly in socket, an unpaid gift from a dead teammate who had laughed just as much as Hayate did, hadn't he?

Genma sees his sharp collarbones, angled enough to stab yourself on—remembers counting someone else's jutting ribs and then kissing them away into the night, tracing tongues up clavicles, into hollows of a razor-edged neck and shoulders—and watches the shadows and sunlight playing over a mouth, coloring lips that Hayate had once kissed purple-pink.

So fucked up. So shitty.

Hayate would've laughed.

Genma leans in farther, eddies of water clinging to his hipbones, senbon twirling over his fingers, and presses his lips to the ones Hayate had kissed. It's childish. It's stupid and petty and selfish. He just socked Sharigan no Kakashi, but Genma doesn't give a fuck about anything much like rules anymore.

The lips kiss back.

Kakashi kisses back. He tastes like ripped metal and salty waves, and nothing like how other lips tasted.

Genma's chin tilts and he angles forward, deeper, his tongue slips in to coil with another; hard, demanding, and pressing. He tastes halfway down Kakashi's throat, along the back of his mouth. He feels the Copy-ninja's long bird-fingers starting to brush into the hair on his neck, and the edges of everything start to splinter apart.

His tongue tastes-

He breaks away blindly, desperately, with a little half choked sound like crushed glass ragging from his throat. He stands in hip deep in winter water, shivering, hands over his face.

So fucked up. So wrong. So beautifully different.

But,

But Genma knew what the back of Kakashi's mouth had tasted like when he brushed it better than he knew what his name was. Knew it better than he knew the chakra that raced through his bones and better than he knew the sound of a dying man's cough.

Kakashi's mouth tastes like blood. It didn't matter if maybe Genma had put the blood there with the hit to Kakashi face moments before. Nothing really mattered. Nothing mattered at all. Not in the slightest.

There is a dead mans laugh on the breeze around them, mocking and soul-crushing and beautiful as fucking ever.

Genma shuddered. Sickness and death and blood lingering on a tongue, a flashing-white smile, the ragged rip of laughter over a raw throat, the shine of a sword in the dark and the force of a pale ice-cold burn-hot skin on his own, dark-heavy eyes sparking under bloodshot rims with shadows and light and bitter, uncaring knowledge.

Genma dragged his hands from his face. He shoved air through his lungs, stared at the unmasked lips that Hayate had kissed.

Kakashi hadn't stopped watching yet, but Genma had.

And Genma feels the world snap and shatter. He cracks his jaw open with an airless gasp, and lets the laughter come spilling out. It grates and stutters, acid nirvana, it burns and tickles at the same time. It's fucking glorious.

Kakashi watches him with an empty red gaze that saw so many people break it had long snapped itself, little pieces and stringy-strings lying calm and quiet and broken on the floor.

Genma flops back on to the waters surface, hands and feet spread wide. He floats like an ice cube and thinks of nothing—men that leapt higher than they could and fell like birds, men who stole kisses, men who tasted like blood—nothing that matters, and laughs like a hysterical, dying man.

He laughs until his voice turns from laughing to wheezing and from wheezing to coughing, and then the coughing turns to hacking. Then it all evens out and he starts all over again.

The sun sends bleeding rays into the sky as it sets above their heads.

X

Fin

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! All feedback is much appreciated. 
> 
> -Lute


End file.
